My struggle with Gospel chronology prompted me to read “Can We Trust the Gospels?” by Peter J. Williams, credited as being one of the world’s leading authorities on the text of the New Testament. It is a fairly quick and easy read and I highly recommend it. I’ll summarize it some here, just in case you don’t take the time to read it, or perhaps because it might stimulate you to read it.
In the introduction to his book, Williams writes,
Faith is seen as a nonrational belief—something not based on evidence. However, that is not what faith originally meant for Christians. Coming from the Latin word fides, the word faith used to mean something closer to our word trust. Trust, of course, can be based on evidence. [My book looks] at the evidence of the Gospels’ trustworthiness. The great thing about trust is that it is something we all understand to a degree because we all exercise it. Most of us regularly place our personal safety in the hands of others. We trust food suppliers, civil engineers, and car manufacturers literally with our lives….Trusting the Gospels is both the same as trusting other things and different. It is the same in that we often have to evaluate the credibility of people and things in daily life. It is different in that the Gospels contain accounts of miracles and of a man, Jesus Christ, who is presented as the supernatural Son of God who can rightfully claim ownership of our lives.
What Williams has done is written,
a short book explaining to a general audience some of the vast amount of evidence for the trustworthiness of the four Gospels…[It] seeks to present a case for the reliability of the Gospels to those who are thinking about the subject for the first time.”
He examines the writings of three non-Christian historians, two of whom were openly hostile to Christianity, who wrote within ninety years of the origins of Christianity (Cornelius Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Flavius Josephus) and who confirm basic facts from the New Testament. He explains that
by the early third century, evidence from France, southern Egypt, and Syria all shows that the four Gospels were held to be a special collection that held together…and were treated together as the best source for information about Jesus long before any central city, group, or individual in Christianity possessed enough power to impose the collection on other people.
He points out that it is remarkable that we have four sources of information about Jesus written so close to the actual events because we don’t have that for any other individual of that period. He examines whether the authors of the Gospels "knew their stuff.” He looks at their knowledge of geography, names, Jewish culture and ritual, botany, finance, local language, and unusual customs represented in their stories. That is a lot of information to make up for a fictionalized account. He also describes some “undesigned coincidences” between different accounts that are “hard to imagine as deliberately contrived by either author to make the story look authentic….The simplest explanation is that we have basically true complementary accounts, each recording part of a larger body of events.” He spends a whole chapter explaining how we can trust that the Gospels report Jesus’ words accurately. He summarizes the great manuscript evidence we have that the text has not been changed. He explains how any possible alleged contradictions between accounts can actually be resolved. He ends with an examination on why anyone would make all of this up.
This is part of the conclusion of his book:
I do not want to suggest for a moment that all of this cannot be explained away. Humans are ingenious, and therefore, of course, they can explain away anything. In fact, a significant section of professional biblical studies has been relatively successful in providing explanations for each of the isolated phenomena mentioned in this book. However, that could be more an indication of high levels of human ingenuity than of the correctness of these explanations….I would argue that it is rational to [trust the Gospels]. Trusting both the message and the history of the Gospels provides a satisfying choice both intellectually and in wider ways. Trusting the Gospels has explanatory power historically and literally….It is [also] noteworthy that…the record of Jesus within the Gospels also forms a pattern with the Old Testament….[Contents of the Old Testament] map well onto the life, sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus, not just in the eyes of devoted believers, but also in the eyes of those skeptical of the Gospels’ historicity, who use the high level of correspondence between the story of Jesus and the Old Testament to argue that much of the Gospels’ narrative was invented on the basis of the Old Testament….A far easier position is to make a single supposition, that all of history hangs on Jesus. It is a single and simple supposition, but I am not claiming it is a small one. It does have huge explanatory power as it accounts for the signs in the Gospels that would normally be taken as signs of reliability, for the genius of Jesus’ character and teaching, for the evidence for the resurrection, and for the correspondence of Jesus’s life with the Old Testament. Of course, if Jesus is the Word who is coeternal with God, and the one who has come to save the world, then the question of the trustworthiness of the Gospels is not a mere issue of historical interest…If the picture of Jesus in the Gospels is basically true, it logically demands that we give up possession of our lives to serve Jesus Christ, who said repeatedly in every Gospel, “Follow me.”
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